Product
Why MailCraft Prices by Volume, Not by Contacts
Unlimited contacts on every plan, including free. Here's the reasoning, and the math on what it actually saves a growing list.
MailCraft Team · August 28, 2026 · 5 min read
Most email platforms price by how many contacts you store. It's an easy number to put on a pricing page, and it correlates loosely with usage — bigger lists tend to mean more sending. It also means every new signup, every re-engaged lapsed customer, and every contact your product creates automatically pushes you toward a more expensive tier, whether or not you ever email most of them.
The mechanism that bothered us
A SaaS product that syncs every signed-up user into its email tool as a contact — for transactional receipts, product updates, the works — grows its contact count in lockstep with its user count. That's success. Being charged more for it, independent of whether email volume actually grew, is a tax on the thing you're trying to do. We'd rather price the thing that actually costs us money to run: sending.
What MailCraft does instead
Every plan, including the free tier, stores unlimited contacts. The free plan includes 3,000 emails a month at no cost, no credit card required. Paid plans start at $15 a month for Transactional (up to 10,000 emails) and $30 a month for Marketing, with the price per thousand emails dropping as volume grows — you're never paying a premium for a list that's big but rarely emailed.
A concrete comparison
Take a product with 40,000 stored contacts that only emails its most engaged 5,000 users a few times a month — a common shape for a B2B tool where most signups are unengaged trials or long-dormant accounts. A contact-priced platform bills for the full 40,000 regardless of how many of them ever receive a send. MailCraft bills for what actually goes out: a fraction of the emails, at a fraction of the cost, with the other 35,000 contacts sitting in the database for free until they're worth emailing.
One list for transactional and marketing both
Because contacts aren't metered, there's no incentive to keep your transactional recipient list and your marketing list in two separate tools just to avoid double-counting contacts — the exact structure that creates the suppression-list gaps we wrote about when comparing MailCraft to platforms that split the two. One contact record, one suppression list, unlimited contacts, priced by what you send.
Put it into practice
Start on MailCraft's free plan — 3,000 emails a month, no credit card required.
Start free